


it's all so incredibly loud

by pigeonchest



Series: not supposed to come home [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:20:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26289388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonchest/pseuds/pigeonchest
Summary: Uncle has a collection of proverbs about hate. Mostly about how it’s corrosive and burdensome and generally bad, et cetera et cetera forever. But Toph hates Zhao.(toph and the siege of the north.)
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Iroh, Toph Beifong & Zuko
Series: not supposed to come home [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1753861
Comments: 32
Kudos: 147





	it's all so incredibly loud

**Author's Note:**

> this is part of the iroh adopts toph au, and prob doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you haven't read the previous parts of the series. or at least like the series summary, idk?
> 
> title from the glass animals song.

Uncle has a collection of proverbs about hate. Mostly about how it’s corrosive and burdensome and generally bad, et cetera et cetera forever. But Toph hates Zhao. Toph hates Zhao so much. He’s smug and unpleasant, and he doesn’t even bother to be subtle about it when he’s cruel to Zuko. She and Zhao have only crossed paths a few times, and she has a suspicion that Uncle works pretty hard to keep the two of them apart. He has good reason for that. Toph doesn’t go in for subtlety either.

Today, Uncle wasn’t so lucky, and he and Toph happen to be crossing the deck just as Zhao and Zuko are descending from the bridge. Zhao’s been around more than usual ever since the Avatar actually showed up, requisitioning supplies and cheating off Zuko’s map headings. Zhao is always an unholy nuisance, but Zuko’s running hot today and literally vibrating from poorly suppressed anger besides, so Toph feels safe assuming that it wasn’t a very successful rendezvous on the Wani’s end.

“Good afternoon, Captain Zhao,” she says, sickly sweet. 

“It’s Admiral Zhao, actually,” he says. “I was promoted recently.”

Toph doesn’t respond. Uncle coughs.

“I haven’t been a _Captain_ in years,” Zhao says. He sounds tense. Good. 

“I will take this opportunity to congratulate you once more on your well-deserved promotion, Admiral,” says Uncle. He settles a warning hand on Toph’s shoulder. She knows better than to shrug it off in front of company—unlike Zuko, she’s heard of delicacy. She just doesn’t care for it. She plasters on the most simperingly mushy smile she can, widening her eyes until the corners hurt. It’s the expression that An Chen once called her viper-puppy face, sweetness and venom all tangled up. It’s important to meet Zhao on his own deeply insincere level.

“I hope you’ve been well, Admiral,” she says, in a tone that hopefully expresses ‘I hope all your teeth have fallen out of your head.’ 

“Very,” says Zhao. He doesn’t ask how she is or use her proper title, which is a terrible violation of Fire Court manners. Toph once witnessed Uncle and some random major perform the whole entire dance of bows and empty questions while on top of komodo-rhinos on a one-way bridge, just because the major happened to be a distant cousin of a distant cousin of Sozin. The officers who actually worked their way up from low birth are allowed to skip the whole rigamarole, though Zhao would never in a million years have gotten to admiral without a grandfather on the council and at least four tenuous cousins-by-marriage tying him to the royal line. 

Zuko notices the slight, tensing up in preparation to lunge. Of course he does. He gets to trample all over the etiquette because he’s a prince and Uncle is too soft to tell him when he’s being rude, but if anyone else does it in front of him he won’t shut up about it. But as much as Zuko adores creating diplomatic incidents, one Agni Kai was enough. A split second before Zuko can move, Toph steps forward from under Uncle’s quelling hand and dips into a half-bow. It’s just lazy enough to be rude, but not so obvious that Zhao can say anything without looking like an asshole who’s picking on a child. Zhao _is_ an asshole, and he does like to pick on children. But Toph is perfectly aware of all the extenuating circumstances—her eyes, her height, her gender, her royal foster uncle standing right behind her—that’ll let her get away with it.

“I hope you have a safe journey, sir.”

“A safe journey—this is an Eagle-Viper Class warship, not some civilian ferry,” Zhao snaps. It’s just too easy.

Uncle offers Zhao a more correct but equally dismissive bow. If Toph uses the etiquette as a blunt object, Uncle wields it like a stiletto knife. “With respect, Admiral, my ward cannot see your ship. She has no way of knowing if you have command of an Eagle-Viper or a fisherman’s dinghy.” As long as Zhao’s tub is still hitched to the Wani, Toph can see an off-duty pikesman picking his nose on their fourth deck. Uncle chuckles. “Though certainly I must find a way to add these classifications to her education!”

Zhao sniffs and whirls around. “I’ll take my leave,” he drawls. Toph waves goodbye to a spot five feet to his left.

As Zhao steps up to the edge of the deck, Toph focuses and extends her reach over the side of the Wani, feeling out the gangplank that connects Zhao’s ship to theirs. She curls her toes into the deck. With a strategic shift of her weight, a certain support strut bucks just as Zhao happens to be walking over it. He trips and careens, undignified, over the side of his own ship, landing face-first on the deck. His armor clangs, and the two marines flanking him scramble to haul him up.

“What just happened?” Toph asks, pitching her voice so they can hear it on the other deck. “Is Mister Zhao alright?”

“I must have Engineer Yao check on the stability of our boarding equipment,” Uncle says, “though I could swear that it was just maintained at our last port.”

“Super weird,” says Toph, smoothing the strut back into place. Behind them, Zuko’s making that particular strangled noise of his that means he wants to laugh but feels like it’s unbecoming of a prince. 

“What a puzzle,” Uncle says, shepherding Toph towards the stairs. Now that Zhao’s gone it’s time for lunch.

+

It’s always the poles with Zuko these days. Toph would rather the Wani pass the winter at more sensible latitudes, like they always used to do before the Avatar showed up. But now that stupid airbender keeps going further and further north, and Toph has only had the briefest reprieve from shoes this winter. All the time cooped up and blinder than usual and forbidden to go ashore with the crew because the Avatar might attack means Toph has dedicated more time than usual to sculpting.

She approaches the engine room, waiting for the door to open and for An Chen to emerge with her coal. He doesn’t, so she knocks, and knocks again, and then yells, “An Chen! Coal me!” at the top of her lungs.

The door opens, and An Chen clears his throat suspiciously. “Where’s my coal?” Toph asks. 

“I have no coal to spare today, Miss Toph,” An Chen says.

“What? What does that mean, there’s two tons of coal behind you right now.”

“Sorry, Miss Toph. No coal. Prince’s orders.”

Toph scowls. “That asshole,” she mutters. An Chen politely turns back to his work so he can pretend not to hear her badmouth a direct descendent of Agni. 

Toph wheels around and heads up on deck, where she can feel Zuko sparring with Lieutenant Jee. She’s technically not allowed out here at midday when the firebenders practice. Something about how dangerous it is to have a non-firebender who can’t dodge wandering through the line of fire. To Toph that sounds like an exciting challenge, but it’s one of the only rules on the ship that Uncle actually gets upset if she breaks. 

In deference to Uncle’s nerves, she stands on the top stair instead of the deck itself to yell for Zuko. “Prince Zuko!” she shouts. “Let me have my coal!”

“What?” he shouts back. His feet leave the deck seconds before the metal underneath him gets a blast of heat. Uncle always talks about the need for a root in firebending, but Zuko’s bending is so acrobatic. It seems like his feet are hardly ever on the ground.

“More! Coal! For! Toph!” 

Zuko ricochets off the wall of the command tower and lands lightly on the deck. Whatever he just did probably looked really cool, but Toph doesn’t care. 

Zuko exhales the residual heat from his match with Lieutenant Jee, accepts a towel from Uncle, and says, “You can’t have any more.”

“That’s stupid! Why?”

“Because I said so,” Zuko says. Behind him, Uncle coughs disapprovingly. Zuko makes the strangled noise that means he’s rolling his eyes at Uncle. “I mean, because the last two ports wouldn’t let us refuel, and we need to conserve coal if we’re going to catch up with the Avatar.”

“So I can’t have one stupid piece?”

“You’re lucky we aren’t burning any of your little sculptures for fuel,” Zuko sniffs, and Toph doesn’t need to check his heartbeat to know that he’s lying. He wouldn’t dare. “Now get off this deck and let me practice.”

“Yes, please do, my dear,” Uncle calls. “I would like to see Prince Zuko’s Pierce the Heart form once more.”

Toph growls and stomps back down to the rhino hold. The second she can get a hold of some fresh coal, she’s going to make the ugliest bust of Zuko anyone’s ever seen.

+

Toph wouldn’t be caught dead saying it out loud, but she really does like Music Night. All of the crewmen who aren’t yet old enough to be her grandfather take their shore leave and go do things Toph isn’t supposed to know about in port towns, and it’s just Toph and the old-timers. Not that Ko and Jiro and all them aren’t fun, but sometimes it’s nice to get a little culture on the ship. 

Sometimes Uncle lets her play a drum. More often Lieutenant Jee hides all the drums from her. A few years ago, before he knew quite how tone deaf Toph was and how miserable she made her parade of childhood music teachers, Uncle tried to teach her the koto. Toph’s talents do not lie in that direction: noise for noise’s sake is more her speed. Tonight, Jee and Uncle got to the instruments before Toph could. 

“I’ll play pipa,” she says, standing in the middle of the music circle.

“What a generous offer,” says Uncle. He nudges one of the crates they use for chairs a finger’s width to the left. “Unfortunately, Ensign Eizo has already claimed that role for the evening.”

“Drums, then.”

“Mm. Too late,” says Jee, with not a hint of apology in his voice.

“Of course we always appreciate a thoughtful audience,” Uncle says. Eizo starts plucking idly at the pipa. Toph snorts and clomps over to the gangplank. 

“Have fun,” she says, stepping over the side of the ship. The men don’t like to drink when she’s around, so she’ll go entertain herself on shore while they get tipsy on the baiju that the cook pretends not to brew in the storeroom next to the rhino hold. If she gives them enough time they’ll start telling stories. Sappy folktales first, but later in the night they move on to the real gory stuff, stories about their first campaigns under Azulon and the girls they met in Earth Kingdom ports, and they won’t notice or care if Toph sneaks back up on deck to listen.

She reaches the bottom of the gangway and gingerly puts one foot down to test the surface of the mooring. Most times the Wani docks at a sensible stone quay, but once Toph was too enthusiastic and jumped off the gangway onto a shitty wooden pier, then got so turned around she nearly fell into the harbor. This one, luckily, is a nice sturdy rock. She steps down and kneels on the quay, feeling her world dizzily expand along the whole stretch of the earth. Her fingers and toes sink into the stone. It’s cold and tight, like the weak midwinter sun wasn’t quite enough to burn off the frost from the night before.

Toph never goes far from the ship on nights like these. She could, though, if she wanted to, and she’ll cling to that small independence. She could go if she really wanted to. But she likes to listen to the music, so she stays close enough for the sound to float down over the side of the ship to her.

Eizo sings first, a string of weepy ballads from his hometown in the mountains. Not to Toph’s taste, but the accompaniment is nice. Toph can sense some gull-rats scuttling around in a pile of crates at the end of the quay, but they won’t bother her. A man stumbles by—a few inches taller than Zuko but not as muscular, unarmed. Toph stretches her awareness to see if Zuko is actually still sulking in his quarters on the Wani or if he’s slipped out on one of his little adventures. She can’t find his familiar sillhouette anywhere in town, so either he’s gone further afield or he really is just in his room being a baby. Zuko thinks he’s so slick, practicing sword forms in his quarters right above hers, skulking around inside the ductwork like an eel-snake, sneaking in between the marines on watch late at night and going right over the side of the ship. Zuko likes to think he’s invisible. No one is invisible to Toph. 

Jee starts singing next in his gravely baritone, which is a sure sign they’ve brought out the liquor. Toph shifts her focus from the dock to the water. She’s experimented over the years with ways to sense the ship when she’s not actually on board, but never successfully. Now she can spread her awareness across sand almost as well as she can with dirt, but water itself is still a no-go. There was a wreck at the mouth of the harbor, within the last year or so based on the way the sand has settled around it. Somebody lost a boot right off the side of the quay. The harbor is full of little lobster-crabs creeping across the bottom. Toph wonders if the people in this town eat lobster-crabs, how they serve them here. They were an impossible delicacy during her landlocked childhood, and then she ate so many during her first year or so on the Wani that the smell still makes her nauseous. 

She gets a little lost in the movement of the lobster-crabs—it’s all the little legs, they’re mesmerizing—until a flurry of approaching movement pulls her attention back to land. There’s a groups of soldiers coming, unfamiliar footsteps, full armor, marching. Not unusual at a garrison this close to the northern action, but weird for this time of night and weirder this close to the Wani’s mooring. It’s certainly not Jiro and Ko and them, who have never marched in anything close to a uniform formation as long as Toph has known them. It’s not until they get close enough for Toph to hear the recognizably oily voice giving orders at the head of the march that she figures it out: it’s Zhao. Bad news.

+

Uncle doesn’t let Toph say goodbye to any of the crew as Zhao takes them away. He makes her stand beside him on the deck and wave down to where they’re assembled on the quay. She can’t see them well from up here, not with the water fucking up her vision. She can barely even tell if she’s waving in the right direction.

“Just let me go down there,” Toph hisses to Uncle. “I want to say bye for real.”

“The further you can stay from Zhao, the better,” Uncle says, winding an arm tight around her shoulders. Toph has a sculpture of a turtle-goat that she just finished this morning. It’s still in her quarters, but she wanted to give it to Helmsman Shen as a good luck charm. Apparently he’ll just have to do without on his way to the Water Tribe.

“They are leaving now,” Uncle says. Toph waves harder.

“Bye guys!” she yells.

“Bye Miss Toph! Stay warm!” one of them yells back. It’s got to be Jiro. He’s the only one who cares so little about propriety in front of an Admiral.

Zuko just sulks harder after the revelation that Zhao is stealing the crew. He was already in a mood and has been for the last month and a half, but Toph thought he at least might come wave goodbye to the men who kept his ship from rusting out from under him for three years. And of course he won’t come on an evening walk with her and Uncle either.

+

Toph hears it when the ship explodes. The screech of metal tearing, the roar of a fire starting. She feels it too, heat on her face and a concussion in her eardrums so strong and dizzying it knocks her over. When chunks of warped metal start to hit the quay, she feels it in the palms of her hands rather than her feet.

“Fuck,” she says, and Uncle doesn’t scold her for swearing.

+

Uncle takes her to a dockside inn. He deposits her on a bed, wraps her in a blanket. Says, as seriously as she’s ever heard him say anything, “Stay here. Do not move from this spot until I come back.”

Uncle leaves, and the room is quiet. There must be draperies on the walls to block sound, like some of the nicer inns have. Toph isn’t sure if this inn is actually nice or if it’s just got delusions of grandeur. Toph thinks about going out the window. Toph thinks about leveling this stupid, awful town. She doesn’t move.

+

“Prince Zuko is dead,” Uncle says when he comes back, so late that night Toph thinks it must be almost morning.

“You’re lying,” Toph says, and at first it’s all she can think to say in that split second of horrible hideous shock, and then she kicks her feet free of the blanket and presses them so hard to the floor that it feels like the bone connects and the floor is wooden and she can’t _tell_. “That’s not true. You’re _lying._ ”

Uncle shakes his head very slowly. He reaches out and takes her hand between both of his. “I am so sorry, my dear. Admiral Zhao and the crew have found no evidence that he lives.” Uncle’s hands are not shaking. Toph takes a deep breath and tries to understand.

“You must be strong, child.” Toph knows Iroh’s heartbeat better than any other. It’s the slowest, steadiest heartbeat she’s ever known on a living person. She can feel it now in his palms, and it doesn’t tell her anything. “I wish I had more time to explain.”

The last time Iroh told her to be strong was on the edge of the Fire Nation capital city, when he pressed warm hands to her thin shoulders and passed her over to a coterie of servants whose smells and heartbeats were all completely unfamiliar to her, who sheltered her in the middle of a silken crowd until she met Uncle again on the Wani. Toph knows, logically, that she has been in danger since then. She’s lived on a warship, chasing the most powerful spirit in the world between continents. But physical threats don’t scare Toph. Toph knows she’s strong, even if she has to keep it a secret. Uncle knows it too. Which means whatever’s happening now must be more than she can handle by tossing a rock or ensnaring feet in metal.

“Zhao has found a place for the Wani’s crew in his invasion force,” Uncle says. “I have been asked to assist.”

“What,” says Toph.

“I have found a place for you to stay in the meantime,” says Uncle.

“No,” says Toph.

“I do not think I will be gone for long,” says Uncle.

“Stop it, Uncle,” Toph says. “I can come. I can be useful.”

Uncle sighs. “I have been too selfish in your upbringing, my dear, and in Prince Zuko’s. Keeping you close to me is no longer the ultimate good.”

Toph doesn’t know what the hell that means. “Don’t _go_ ,” she says. She wishes she could swim, so she could follow the fleet north. She wishes she were three years older so she could enlist. She wishes she were Uncle’s daughter for real, the way the crew used to whisper about, so he would have no excuse to leave her behind.

“I will come back,” Uncle says. “This will not be forever.” She presses her fingertips into his wrist. His heartbeat stays the same.

+

So Zhao takes Uncle. He takes the crew too, just like he took the shitty boat that’s been Toph’s only home for three years and the turtle-goat for Helmsman Shen and the sculpture of the Avatar’s bison she was working on in secret. She was going to give it to Uncle, but now Uncle is on the way to the Northern Water Tribe and her sculptures are resting on the bottom of the harbor.

Toph is deposited at the home of the Fire Nation harbormaster. The house is a sprawling stone compound that’s clearly older than the occupation; Toph wonders who it belonged to before. The harbormaster is a thin, nervous man who bows to Uncle a thousand times and then ushers Toph out of the room to a courtyard where his wife is waiting with tea. He doesn’t let her say goodbye, too eager to impress Uncle with his grasp of half-remembered High Court etiquette. The harbormaster’s wife smells like vinegar under too many layers of flowery perfume, and the tea she serves Toph is oversteeped.

“Just like home, isn’t it?” The harbormaster’s wife says to Toph, gesturing out at a garden that Toph can’t see. She can sense it, of course, but it’s the principle of the thing. “It’s an exact replica of the garden in my grandfather’s house. In the Caldera.” Toph doesn’t know what Uncle told the harbormaster about her, about who she is. But she has his wife figured out within ten minutes of entering the house. A daughter from a family with decaying influence, married off to a colonial functionary and longing for luxuries that don’t exist anymore, here or in her old home. The Beifongs were on the upswing when Toph left, but she knows the type.

The garden is not like home. The closest thing Toph had to home has been taken apart for scrap iron and never had a single live plant onboard. It’s not like the Caldera either. What little time Toph spent there was mostly in the dead dowager’s luxurious gardens, where everything from the shapes of the leaves to the heavy volcanic soil to the taste of the air was completely different from this lonely woman’s sad imitation. Toph uproots a dying tree with a twist of her hand while the harbormaster’s wife isn’t looking.

She sips her terrible tea and senses the exact moment when the harbormaster’s bowing stops and Uncle leaves the house. She follows his familiar footsteps down the road, into the bustle of the town, towards the harbor, until she loses him.

Toph does not like uncertainty. She does not like to be left behind. She paces the courtyards of the harbormaster’s house like an animal trapped, kicking off the slippers and socks that the harbormaster’s wife brought to her room and digging her toes into the soil of the garden.

She bides her time, stretching and molding her awareness until it can tunnel through all the imprecise dirt and dust to the harbor, waiting for a fleet of warships to dock and appear on the edge of her consciousness. Waiting for a flood of armored footsteps to tramp into town, for any one of twenty treads she’s long memorized. They don’t appear after a day, after two. The harbormaster doesn’t seem worried yet. Toph doesn’t worry either. She just paces.

+

It’s almost like there’s a big hole in her brain where Zuko is supposed to be. A lost tooth, a missing stair. Zuko can’t possibly be dead. Zuko is tougher than a wharf roach-rat. Zuko was on a ship that exploded. An explosion could certainly kill a rat.

When he comes back from whatever stupid hiding spot he’s found now, Toph is going to yell at him like he’s never been yelled at before. She’ll dent his precious swords and bruise his arms with her sharpest-knuckled punches and she’ll hide the chili flakes so his dinner will be bland, and he’ll never get a moment of peace ever again. Nevermind that his swords and the chili flakes were on the Wani when it blew. Nevermind that Zuko is dead.

She walks the perimeter of the harbormaster’s garden, scoring a line in the stone wall with her fingertip. If she circles the garden enough times, Toph thinks, the line she’s making will dig in deep enough to topple the whole house.

+

After four days, Toph allows herself to wonder. This town isn’t far from the Northern Tribe’s boundaries—just over a day of sailing at standard open ocean speeds. Though that’s what Zuko was planning, which means that a captain with more normal expectations of ship and crew capacity would probably do it in two and a half. Anyway, they should be there by now. Toph should have been able to sense a stir down at the garrison, the kind of movement and uproar that follows an arriving messenger hawk from a major battlefront. 

Toph sits in the garden all day with her hands and feet in the dirt, waiting for something useful to come into the range of her senses. The damp sinks into the seat of her Navy tunic. The harbormaster’s wife keeps hopefully leaving dresses on the bed they’ve given her. The fabric is dusty and smells like camphor; there hasn’t been a kid Toph’s size in this awful house in a long time.

The harbormaster’s wife, who won’t leave her alone, appears in the doorway sometime after sunset. Probably a while after, given the way the ground has lost all the meager warmth from the winter sun. 

“You didn’t come in for dinner, dear child. Are you sure you don’t want to eat?”

Toph is nobody’s dear child except Uncle’s. “I’m not hungry. And I don’t like your food,” she says. The harbormaster’s wife is the childless kind of lonely. Toph wishes Uncle had just left her at the garrison. She sinks her feet into the cold rocky soil up to the ankles, waiting.

“There’s sweets,” the harbormaster’s wife says. Toph considers. She wants sweets, but she doesn’t want to give the harbormaster’s wife any ground to stand on. The woman is already pushing it. But before Toph can craft just the right posture for ignoring her, the harbormaster’s wife gasps into her hands and her heart skips a beat.

People talk all the time about hearts skipping beats, especially in Uncle’s favorite awful poems. In Toph’s experience, it’s actually pretty rare for a heart to leave its predetermined track. It’s also usually very bad. The harbormaster’s wife clutches one of her shabby little trees as her knees buckle.

“What’s going on?” Toph snaps. “What’s wrong?”

“The moon,” she says, raising a shaking hand towards the sky.

The moon has never interested Toph. She can’t see it, can’t feel it, can’t use it to get any particular benefit for her bending. The moon does not apply to Toph. “What _about_ the moon,” Toph says.

“Oh, Agni. Oh, no,” she says, instead of explaining. Whatever is wrong with the moon, Toph thinks, Agni is probably not the guy to talk to about fixing it.

+

Nobody in the harbormaster’s house sleeps that night. Nobody in town, none of the soldiers left in the garrison, probably nobody in the entire world. Everybody is waiting, breathing in terrified sync, to see if the moon will go out again, to see if the sun will come up at all. Maybe it won’t, maybe the Earth Kingdom will sink into the sea, maybe the spirits will swallow the world. It doesn’t matter to Toph. The sun does come up anyway, so probably everyone was worried about nothing.

It’s not until noon that they get any news. The harbormaster’s wife hasn’t let Toph leave the bedroom, where she lies on her back on the chill stone floor, knees up so she can press the whole sole of her foot down. She feels it in her palms and feet and back when the messenger from the garrison sprints up the road to the harbormaster’s door. Toph leaps up, scrambling across the room to press an ear to the crack between the door and the floor.

“—the moon spirit,” the messenger is saying, breathless. “Completely decimated the fleet. The _whole fleet_.”

The harbormaster whispers something Toph can’t hear. With her hand to the floor, she can tell that the harbormaster is shaking.

“The ship that just came in—they’re saying they’re the only survivors. Thirty sailors, and half of them are so frost-bitten they likely won’t make it to tomorrow.”

“And Admiral Zhao? The General?”

“No sign of them,” the messenger says. Toph stops listening. Toph stops being, for a moment. Toph ceases to exist except where her skin touches the cold stone.

Most people wouldn’t consider the life Toph has had for the past three years to be especially normal or stable or suitable for a kid. But she always had Zuko and the crew so she wasn’t lonely. And Uncle was always, always there. Steadying her first uneven, seasick steps, buying her candied hawthorne in ports, letting her run around in pants and no shoes. And now he’s gone and Zuko’s gone and the whole crew is probably gone too, and that means Toph is completely alone. It’s just her and the cold, cold flagstone floor.

\+ 

Toph has always been better at the finicky stuff when it comes to bending—sensing a tiny shift in someone’s weight, writing in sand, impressing fine, delicate textures on pieces of coal. All the power and drama that traditionally comes with earthbending has never been Toph’s forte. After all, she’s never had any place to practice the monumental stuff. But better late than never, or whatever. She leaves the harbormaster’s house through her bedroom window, and she takes the garden wall with her when she goes.

**Author's Note:**

> since i posted the last installment of this series i’ve moved cross country twice! i absolutely do not recommend this! somehow three months and like 3000 miles of travel later i ended up 45 minutes away from where i started! but to celebrate wrestling my life out of a shambles: here is 5k of toph having a temper tantrum.
> 
> everything i do, i do for comments - let me kno what yall thought!


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